As Booth Brothers Held Forth, 1864 Confederate Plot Against New York Fizzled

On Nov. 25, 1864, at some point in the middle of Act II, after Brutus and his co-conspirators decide to assassinate Julius Caesar, the capacity crowd of 2,000 that had filled the Winter Garden Theater on lower Broadway was startled by the sudden clanging of fire-bells, coming from every direction.

After conferring with the theater manager, Brutus, played by Edwin Thomas Booth, calmly announced from the stage that, indeed, a small fire had broken out at the adjacent Lafarge House Hotel, but had been extinguished.

The benefit performance, also starring his brothers, Junius Brutus Jr. as Cassius and John Wilkes as Marc Antony, had been mounted to subsidize a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park, and resumed without further interruption.

It was only after the final curtain, when exiting theatergoers heard newsboys barking headlines like “Rebel Plot: Attempt to Burn City,” that the extent of the real life drama unfolding outside that Friday night became clear.

Confederate saboteurs had infiltrated New York City via Canada, intending originally to disrupt the Nov. 8 presidential election. Thwarted by an infusion of federal troops, but still incensed by the Union Army’s scorched earth campaign against Southern military installations and industrial sites, they tried to set the city ablaze instead.

“The plan was excellently well conceived, and evidently prepared with great care,” The New York Times reported, “and had it been executed with one-half the ability with which it was drawn up, no human power could have saved this city from utter destruction.”

Among the targets was the Lafarge (later the site of the Broadway Central Hotel and still later a New York University dormitory), which was adjacent to the Winter Garden on Broadway and Third Street, where the Booth brothers were performing together for the first time.

“When the alarm of fire was given at the Lafarge,” The Times later wrote, “the excitement became very intense among the closely-packed mass of human beings in [the] Winter Garden Theatre adjoining the Lafarge, and but for the presence of mind of Mr. Booth, who addressed them from the stage of the theater, telling them there was no danger, it is fearful to think what would have been the result.”

The attack took place on Evacuation Day, the anniversary of the departure of British troops from New York in 1783, which was still spiritedly celebrated, particularly among Irish-immigrant Anglophobes, some of whom had joined in the Draft Riots in 1863.

In a book about the attack, “The Man Who Tried to Burn New York,” Nat Brandt quoted a Confederate newspaper in Richmond, Va., which disavowed the plot a week after it was exposed. “If there is any place in the North that ought to be spared, that place is New York,” the editorial said. “Not that its population is overtly friendly to us, but that it is undeniably hostile to Lincoln and his government.”

Still, as Clint Johnson wrote in “A Vast and Fiendish Plot,” while the city’s merchants had believed before the war that what was good for the South was good for New York, “Southerners just could not get past the fact that 40 cents of every dollar of cotton sold went into the pockets of New Yorkers” for shipping costs and interest payments on loans.

Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar and the author, most recently, of “Lincoln and the Power of the Press,” said: “It’s hard to know whether this Evacuation Day terrorist plot ever could have succeeded. The arson technology involved was so primitive, and the would-be terrorists so eager to flee from the fires they thought they would be setting (unlike modern suicide bombers, fortunately), that the enterprise was bound to fizzle rather than sizzle.

“But there is no doubt that this was a deadly serious attempt to make New York howl in the same way Sherman was, at that very time, making Georgia howl. It was a plan to strike fear in the hearts of Northern civilians and break their will to fight.”

Eight saboteurs escaped to Canada, but one, Robert Cobb Kennedy of Louisiana, was arrested when he slipped back into the United States en route to Richmond. He was executed at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor — now the site of the Brooklyn tower of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge — four months after the plot failed.

He was the last Confederate prisoner executed by the government before the Civil War ended, about two weeks later.

Two mornings after their benefit performance raised $4,000 for the Shakespeare statue (it still stands on the Mall in Central Park), the Booth brothers met for breakfast at Edwin’s home at 28 East 19th Street. Like the performance, their breakfast was rudely interrupted. Edwin, who had just voted for the first time — for Lincoln — dismissed John’s defense of the plot as just retribution for Union atrocities, accused him of treasonous sentiments and demanded that he leave.

Later, in 1865, after his brother John killed Lincoln, Edwin Booth received a letter from a friend in Washington revealing that an unidentified 21-year-old whom Edwin had rescued a year earlier after he had slipped off the platform at the Jersey City train station was none other than Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s son. The letter was said to have provided the Booth family some comfort.

Correction:

An article on Tuesday about a Confederate plot in 1864 to try to burn down multiple New York City buildings, including a hotel next to a theater where John Wilkes Booth and his brothers happened to be performing “Julius Caesar,” misidentified the role played by Edwin Thomas Booth. He was Brutus, not Caesar.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: As Booths Took Stage, South’s Plot Against City Fizzled. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe